


a blessing in disguise

by never_going_home



Category: Merlin (TV)
Genre: Do it, F/F, Gen, M/M, and i'm having SO MUCH FUN, and lack thereof, and the nature of gods, can you tell i've been Inspired by Pterry Pratchett?, cos i have, god of winter!gwen, gwenfest, i love small gods, musings on humanity, read discworld, read it, read small gods everyone, seriously this is a 'gwen is a god' au, your life will be infinitely better
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-01-20
Updated: 2021-01-20
Packaged: 2021-03-18 20:21:23
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,022
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28872996
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/never_going_home/pseuds/never_going_home
Summary: Week 2 @gwenfest (it's very late lmao sorry): AUGuinevere is a god. Morgana falls in love with her. Merlin is somewhere in the background, with pie. Arthur doesn’t know what’s even going on anymore. That's all there is to it, really.
Relationships: Gwen & Morgana (Merlin), Gwen/Morgana (Merlin), Merlin/Arthur Pendragon (Merlin)
Comments: 2
Kudos: 10
Collections: Gwen Fest





	a blessing in disguise

**Author's Note:**

> this is late! sorry! i've had a lot of fun with this ngl. i'll update my other works.... maybe. one day. perhaps.

Guinevere is a god. More specifically, the god of wintertime, of dead things and cold things and of the small spark of rebirth hidden deep within the heart of the earth. Once, she was great. Once, whole empires bowed to her, and temples were built in her honour.

Now she is little more than a shadow. The temples have crumbled and been swallowed by time, and the bowing empires long since fallen. Lost in memory, little more than a footnote in the great tale of history. It is the fate they share, her and her people. But, hidden deep within her is a small spark of rebirth, waiting to be set alight.

In the beginning, there is a song.

(Well, that’s a lie. In the _very_ beginning, there was nothing but whiteness, and _then_ there was a song. Or, more correctly, a single, pure note, spreading out into harmonies and canons and syncopations as the very universe itself was created. But that is not the beginning I speak of. _This_ beginning begins much, much later than that one.)

Guinevere stirs from her long-sleep, blinking. Where once her dominion spread over almost the entirety of this world, she’s now retreated to the centre of the very north, where there is only ice and snow for company. No animal dare come even here, for fear of her wrath. She looks at the blue walls of the chasm she’s entombed herself in, trails her fingers over the bed of rock-ice she made for herself. Listens.

And hears something.

It’s what woke her from the long-sleep, she’s sure of it. A… song. She stands, the mortal shell she put around herself dissipating. In an instant, she becomes a snowstorm halfway across the world, freezing the tears on a dying man’s face. Then she is a cold wind, whistling lament to the evergreen pines, ripping through the air at a tremendous speed. And then-

The feel of summer burns her. She gasps, curling frost around her protectively, spinning back to an ancient cave where the air is more frigid, more suited to what Guinevere is. The song cuts through her mind again, like a sharpened blade of silver, so cold, so sharp, so _clean._ She finds another form to cloak herself in, spinning it from the filament of memory. A woman of the humans, quite naked when Guinevere slides into the skin she’s conjured for herself. She takes a moment to remember what the humans call clothes, calls them forth, then shreds the skin away, letting herself be the winter once more.

And then- the song ends. Guinevere screams. Because the song was _her_ song, a song temple acolytes used to sing in her name, a song of belief that feeds the spark within her, coaxing it gently to flame.

She has not been entirely forgotten.

Guinevere smiles, and waits. She is a god. She is good at waiting.

(Here is an interesting thing about gods; for all their power, for all their otherworldly might, they need humans, for humans are the only creatures that _believe._ Gods are made, but humans are the ones that make them. And when a god is forgotten, when the belief fades…

There is something humans do called dying. They believe in it very strongly, enough that death – that Death – has any number of forms. Guinevere has met the Death. Death’s favourite form is a skeleton with not-eyes the colour of infinity. But that is beside the point. The _point_ is that gods can die, in a way. Not truly, just as they are made, not birthed, so they cannot ever truly _die,_ mortal concept though it is, but they fade away, become a shade, a whisper, and perhaps death would be a better end after all.)

The winter comes, and Guinevere feels the cold thrill of power race along her spine when she returns to the corporeal form she has spent so long perfecting. The clothes were a particular joy to make, as she tarried in her cave during the summer and the autumn; white and chasm-blue and a whimsical shade of green she has heard humans call _eau-de-nil._ They swirl around her as though she is a pillar of wind (which she is) turning and tumbling and rippling even when she stands still.

Of course, she is the wind, she is the icy storm, she is the coldness that blankets the land, so she never stands still. But still. Poetic imagery is nice, although Guinevere would not understand a single word of that sentence. Poetry? A mere fancy of human minds, just as imagery is. Nice? She is a god. She is not _nice._ She is the wind, the icy storm, the coldness that blankets the land, she does not need to be _nice._

And she heard the song again. Again and again, each day as she tarried in her cave during the summer and the autumn. And now – finally, finally! – she can act upon it.

She will not let her curiosity sway her – she is a _god,_ not a petty, paltry, _mortal_ human. She can wait. She is a _god,_ after all. She is good at waiting.

So she walks through the land, and because she is a god, the human skin she wears is human only in appearance. If she were truly one of them, her feet would’ve blistered and frozen, her fingers would’ve been torn off, her face would’ve been stained white by the cold, and she would’ve died. She wears no shoes, she wears no gloves, she wears no headdress, only robes as cold as the heart of winter. She is the god of winter, after all, and she only wears robes because she thinks them clever.

Guinevere wonders at how the winters continued, when the belief in her faded so. Whether there had been winter at all, when she had slept her long-sleep. If autumn simply bled into spring, with no buffer of icy harshness to sweep the land and cleanse it, then light the spark within the land and birth it anew. But then she remembers the whiteness in the beginning, and the _possibility_ of being winter, not made until given shape and form and thought by the humans. There was winter before her, she knows well, so it stands to reason that there would be winter after.

The realisation should not hurt her as much as she does. She sneers and clenches her fist, bringing down shards of sleet instead of snow, wiping all life in a fifty-mile radius around her from existence, from the merest worm in the frozen soil to the child tending her village’s flock of sheep. She thinks the earth-dwellers should count herself lucky that she did not freeze them all. The land may not need her, the humans may not want her, but she is still here, and she will make her presence _count,_ and then perhaps they would show remorse and feed the spark within her until it is a roaring bonfire, like those humans once lit for midwinter. She wonders if they do so now.

Guinevere _moves,_ blurring from one place into the other, following the tug of the song. It is the deepest, filthiest secret of all the gods that they need humans to… survive, if not to live, because they are _gods,_ and only petty, paltry, _mortal_ humans need to _live._ If the other gods saw how desperately she sought the tiniest shred of belief, they would mock her and scorn her with the derision that only gods could have, and yet all of them would do the same, would they be in her place.

(Here is an interesting thing about gods; they were made by _humans._ This you already know, for this I have already told you, but there are _implications_ that perhaps have not been considered _._ Because gods were made by humans, they were made in the image of humans, although many believed the opposite, both immortal and mortal alike. Gods are _gods,_ and so they take each human quality they were so bestowed and twist them. For all the power the gods hold, they still reach and fall trying to obtain, even trying to _understand_ the one thing that makes petty, paltry, _mortal_ humans petty and paltry, mortal and human. None yet have ever succeeded in this search, because what they seek to understand is also what they need to understand, and why they fail to time and time again, thus creating a paradox.

Come closer now, let me whisper it in your ear.

Are you ready?

The thing that the gods need, the thing that will so blatantly unravel them should any ever gain it, the very thing that stops them from getting what they want, is humanity.

What is humanity? The gods argue, ever missing the point. What do they have – they, created in our images (this, as I have told you, is nothing but a delusion of grandeur), they, little more than clay and water and iron, what do _they_ have that we do not?

Well, the humans have love, and they have tolerance, and they have patience. Gods have none of these things. Only humans can love, can be patient and hold tolerance without an ulterior motive. A god may love its people, but that is because its people give it belief. A god may seem patient and tolerant, but they are only waiting. They are _gods,_ after all, and what is a human life in comparison with the deep stretches of time that the gods themselves inhabit?

Nothing, is the answer. Nothing at all. And yet the humans know how to be something that the gods do not. They know how to be _human,_ and they know how to be kind.)

Guinevere is the icy draft that blows the through open windows. She floats lazily around the chambers of the singer, studying them. There is no one in sight.

Someone says something. It sounds admonishing. The windows are shut, but it is of no matter to Guinevere. She can sink into the very stones should she so choose to. She doesn’t, though. Instead, she concentrates, building the form around her within a moment. The door bangs open, and a dark-haired woman strides in. She stops short when she sees Guinevere, which Guinevere is both pleased and gratified about. Nothing and no one could see her, not unless they _believed._

“Where did you learn that song?” Guinevere asks shortly, looking the woman up and down. The woman says something in a language Guinevere does not understand. She gives herself a moment by mortal reckoning to let knowing flow through her, and tries again.

“Where did you learn that song?” she asks in the human’s language.

“Who are you?”

Humans, Guinevere thinks, filled with visions of their own self-importance. A _human,_ questioning, _her,_ a _god?_ It’s laughable, so Guinevere laughs.

“Come closer, human. Let me see you better.” The woman stays still.

“Who _are_ you? Why are you in my chamber? I’ll call the guards!”

“No, you won’t.” The human woman shakes her head, her eyes glazed with momentary god-glamour.

“No, I won’t.” She blinks, and it’s gone. Guinevere leans forward, fascinated. Never has she met a human who has been able to throw off the god-glamour before.

“Was that magic?”

“No.”

“You’re lying.” Humans are so _frustrating,_ looking for falsehoods and finding them where there are none.

“It’s not magic,” says Guinevere in what she considers to be a pleasant tone of voice. “It’s far, far older than magic.”

“I still don’t believe you.”

“Well, perhaps you should. I am a god, after all, and I do not tell lies.”

“You’re insane. Gua-!” the first syllable never passes her lips. Guinevere smiles at her, and it is the smile of the winter, cold and sharp.

“Do you believe me now, human?” the woman stares at her, amazed and confused, then turns on her heel and walks out the door again, slamming it shut behind her. That went well, Guinevere thinks as she makes her mortal form vanish. She sinks into the stone, and then she is gone.


End file.
